he introduced the term of behavioural environment in his contemplations that he defined as a “psycho-physical field within which phenomenal facts are organized into patterns or structures and are given substance depending on the cultural contexts.”6 Wright and Kirk’s merit lies in the fact that they have, independently from one another, encouraged in geography “the study of human spatial imagination and subjectivity in the interpretation of environment”.7 Great changes in the way landscape is interpreted were brought by cultural materialism that appeared at the end of 1970s in Great Britain. Cultural materialism emphasised the connection between cultural landscape and the historical occurrences which had marked it through the epochs, among which particular importance is given to social, economic, and political elements and the balance of power. In his book “Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape,” Denis Cosgrove, one of the main representatives of this school of thought, defined landscape as a specific “way of seeing”. He founded his hypothesis on the results of examining changes that had occurred in European landscape painting. Although it was known as early as the age of antiquity, in a European context landscape painting developed in the 15th century in Flanders and northern Italy, and achieved its full momentum two centuries later. Cosgrove considers landscape to be a “bourgeois and individual ‘way of seeing’ which is connected to the application of rule over space,” and “was created as a dimension of the worldview of the European elite”.8 At the peak of the development of Humanism, Renaissance, whose fundamental and sole role model was the antiquity, entered the European cultural scene. The importance of proportions that rule the ancient Greek Cosmos was possible to understand thanks to human intellect which manifested itself as a “product of intellectual thinking”.9 Geometry, which served as a reflection of the harmony of the Cosmos, was beginning to be sought in this world’s Chaos, in architecture (F. Brunelleschi) as well as in painting (Masaccio), but also in other fields such as cartography. This constituted a crucial turn from the theocentric medieval understanding of the world and nature towards the anthropocentric view of the renaissance where landscape as a reflection of the wisdom of God, the Father, was seen through the eyes of man, a subject who has only his own singular viewpoint. This was the beginning of the era of subjectivism and individualism which followed the western civilization to this day. In a visual sense, the geometrical (linear) perspective was shown to be the most adequate way of expressing this subjectivism through painting. Erwin Panofsky and Rudolf Arnheim saw in the geometric perspective the reflection of aspirations of Humanism towards individualism. However, this kind of worldview is marked by certain paradoxes. Arnheim writes that the problem of geometric perspective can be found in that it is attempting to create a “correct” and “realistic” depiction by deforming the normal shape of objects through “complicated mathematical calculations”.10 The realism of geometric perspective is an illusion because, based on mathematical and 6 7 8 9 10
10
Ibid, 87. Ibid. Taken from: Šakaja, Uvod u kulturnu geografiju, 115. Ibid. Ibid, 116.]